This paper investigates the effects of public childcare availability in Italy on mothers' working status and children's scholastic achievements. We use a newly available dataset containing individual standardized test scores of pupils attending second grade of primary school in 2008-09 in...

Our study analyses the costs and benefits of early child care for mothers’ labour supply and child development in Italy, exploring the role of the selection criteria used by local governments to assign child care slots. In Italy, only around 13% of the demand for public child care...

There is some controversy in the field of household economics regarding the efficiency of household decisions. We make the point that a flexible specification of spousal preferences and the household production technology precludes the possibility of using revealed preference data on household...

While a large literature has focused on the impact of parental investments on child cognitive development, very little is known about the role of child?s own in- vestments. Information on how children invest their time separately from parents is probably little informative for babies and...

In this paper we utilize a model of household investments in the cognitive development of children to explore the impact of various transfer policies on the distribution of child cognitive outcomes in target populations. We develop a cost criterion that can be used to compare the cost...

The recent financial crisis, alongside a dramatic rise in unemployment on both sides of the Atlantic, suggests that financial shocks do translate into the labour markets. In this paper we first present and review the basic facts on unemployment dynamics, financial shocks and Okun's elasticity...

A large body of empirical literature indicates that, contrary to predictions from economic theory, wages in the informal sector increase after a minimum wage hike. This phenomenon was so far explained as a byproduct of a signal (a lighthouse) conveyed by statutory minima to wage setting in the...

In spite of relevant differences between countries, a common international pattern emerges: daughters leave parental homes earlier than sons. Drawing upon the European Community Household Panel, we explore the impacts of various factors that affect daughters' and sons' home-leaving decisions....

The growth in labor market participation among women with young children has raised concerns about the potential negative impact of the mother's absence from home on child outcomes. Recent data show that mother's time spent with children has declined in the last decade, while the indicators of...